Interests and Research#

K.R. Westphal’s research focuses on the character and scope of rational justification in non-formal, substantive domains, both moral (ethics, justice, history & philosophy of law, philosophy of education) and theoretical (epistemology, history & philosophy of science). He has shown how Kant’s Critical philosophy consists in a systematic critique of rational judgment and justification spanning all three of Kant’s Critiques (i.e., Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment) plus his Metaphysics of Morals and his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. He has also shown, on strictly internal grounds, that Kant’s critical philosophy does not require transcendental idealism, that it is more cogent without that idealism, and that Hegel realised all of these points, and both adopted and further developed Kant’s Critical philosophy into a sound, comprehensive account of rational justification in non-formal domains, which integrates the social and historical aspects of human inquiry and cognition with realism about the objects of commonsense and natural scientific knowledge, and with strict objectivity about basic moral norms, within both ethics and justice. He is researching systematically history & philosophy of law, especially Montesquieu, Hegel and Rudolf von Jhering, to develop a cogent normative sociological theory of law and justice.